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Yogi Bhajan Lecture: Enrich Your Mind

Excerpts from a lecture by Yogi Bhajan in The Mind: It's Projections and Multiple Facets

You have fashions and faculties in your mind. Your fashion is how you decide to look, act, and be; how you want to project yourself into the world. You can be a person of spirit, a person of great mental intellect, a person of brute force, a healer, or a leader.

Your faculties are the functions, aspects, and projections that give you abilities. To excel and enjoy life you need to enrich your mind. You must blend and use different combinations of your mental facets to support you and your intentions. When your faculties support your mental fashion and your fashion supports you, you become effective and share a legacy that inspires others.

We have discussed three major faculties of your mind: Negative, Positive, and Neutral. Each has its own function and nature. They combine in different ways to support or to block various mental projections.

The Negative Mind is your first and fastest. It interacts with your thoughts first. It is a protector developed to preserve your life. It can give you a powerful self-understanding and detailed critiques of your actions. It can tell you what is wrong, what might be harmful, and it can locate problems to be solved.

The Positive Mind seeks out what is useful and what can be of benefit. It is results oriented and proposes many solutions and possible avenues of action.

Then you have the Neutral Mind. It is a subtle mind that looks at all positive and negative Facets, assesses, and finds the depths and implications.

Three minds are very essential for excellence in your life: the Applied Mind, Creative Mind, and Executive Mind. Each is unique in its particular combination of faculties and facets. The Applied Mind seeks out the Positive Mind’s solutions, but limits them to what is directly applicable to your goal. In this way it is strong, extremely simple, and achieves results quickly. A refined Applied Mind is a great asset to accomplish much in your life.

Besides the Applied Mind you have a subtle and very powerful mind—the Creative Mind. It is a sweet little thing. Its source is so potent it gives you a direct intuition. It is original and unique.

With all these minds you have another—the Executive Mind. It is a Projective Mind. It moves actions and resources. A lot of people fail because they can’t or won’t decide things. They hesitate and lose the timing or become doubtful and lose the leadership. They will discuss things, shuffle papers, and plan. The Executive Mind decides in seconds. When you have difficult decisions, like a surgeon dealing with life and death, this mind is essential.

Your mind is designed as a preparatory system to guide and aid your life. It is a power to gather your resources and shape your behavior. You can refine the mind, its facets, and all its combinations. Then you can act effectively in your Executive Mind, Creative Mind, Applied Mind, and hundreds of others. But you must train and refine the mind to give you those Functional Minds that serve you and your soul.

The greatest thing you can do is rise in the early morning and do a sadhana—a practice to energize the body and refine your mind.Most of us rebel and go crazy rather than get up early. There are two special time zones, when you have to enrich your mind: one in the morning, from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m., and one in the evening, from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. These are natural moments that have a tide of energy within you and without. The sun and Earth have a special relationship and angle at those times that affect your mind and your energy.

Have you seen all these people who drink, who search for a partner, and who look for drugs? They start the search in earnest, or have the urge to do it, after 4 p.m. Why do they need drink? Why do people feel they need to take drugs? Do they drink to relax? No. So why do they drink?

They do all that out of an instinct to seek stimulation. At those times their biorhythm has gone down, and they feel irritated. They cannot exist like that and have to have a change. Eating a lot of meat just adds to the body’s uric acid that acts as a very powerful stimulant, though it is a harmful force. And adding liquor damages the liver, but it still feels like a stimulant. Without stimulation at that time, people are angry. They act lousy, lazy, and leery.

Why? What is behind this phenomenon? The root cause is that your basic biorhythm of energy, your mental projection and strategy are not reflected in a unisonness of character. Those zones are natural times that shift your energy level, your mental projection, and your performance. That is the time you must direct the mind, refine it, and create a consolidated unisonness of character and projection.

Just open your eyes, train your mind, and do your actions. Your actions will tell you how near or far you are from God. Be direct and face up to your own Infinite vastness. Have vastness as an attitude. Don’t sneak, hide, and avoid the crown of soul and body God gave you. Anyone who has no sense or attitude of vastness, no mental refinement to see the vastness, will at any moment, for no reason, prostitute his own grace, and lose life, leadership, and legacy.

When you acknowledge your vastness, you have manners. Your mind supports your projection. If you have not established some vastness in your attitude, then your habits and facets, your fears and pettiness will betray you.

What is the cure? The protection? This is the secret of the mind enriched by vastness and the secret power of the devotee who trained the mind. The mental world within you has to be one world in unison. All 81 facets of the mind must reach to the best—not good, not better—to the best. Then the three Minds—Negative, Positive, and Neutral—act on that to serve you to be the best.

And over all those minds there is your awareness that controls and supervises the mind. It assesses if it happens to be the best, real, and whole. Finally, you can surrender your mind to your spirit. When you will surrender your mind to your soul, then the soul will make God surrender to you. Don’t react in doubt, guilt, or insecurity. This is a truth.

Each thought and act stirs the Universe and many subtleties occur. They seem like mysteries, but they are masteries. The one power and gift you have from the Almighty is the mind. When the mind is enriched, when the mind has all the 81 facets together, that mind which has all the projections together is capable of Infinity. Mind is the only power you have which is positive, and can be definitely finite or definitely positively Infinite. It can reach both ends of the pendulum.

When you enrich your mind you can break the slavery of low habits and ego. You can act as part of the entire cosmos and learn to elevate and to let go.

Act from your grace, manners, and awareness, and trust the hand of God. You cannot understand and master the mind without this knowledge of yourself, your reality, and your spirit. That ability to turn negative into positive, to support all your actions with your facets and manners is the result of meditation. It comes with the refined mind. It is what develops through sadhana and aradhana. Through japa and discipline.

By the Will of God you are in that image and have earned a life of grace, glory, and greatness. That is what you are born for. We only forget sometimes to be vast. We become too near and personal and have contempt for teachings, teacher, and the world. Just forgive, excel, and lead with grace to leave a legacy of kindness and compassion.

Give this prayer with me: God, give me the vastness, the courage so I can be kind. Give me the strength so that I can serve. Give me the wisdom so I can be positive. Give me the nature so that I can be compassionate. I ask Thee in Thy Name to uplift me my soul so I can serve all in Thy Name.